Stalking the Role of an Operatic Stalker

Norm Lewis, trying on the mask in his dressing room at the Majestic Theater, where he will take over the lead role in “The Phantom of the Opera” on May 12.CreditRichard Perry/The New York Times

By Rob Weinert-Kendt

April 30, 2014

Say a wish out loud enough times, and it might come true. It worked for the Broadway baritone Norm Lewis, anyway. For years, when Mr. Lewis, the star of 2012’s “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess,” was asked what his dream roles would be, he often mentioned Harold Hill in “The Music Man” or Billy Bigelow in “Carousel.” Yet the role he invariably named was the title character in the long-running musical “The Phantom of the Opera,” and at last it has come his way. Mr. Lewis will don the cape and mask for a six-month run starting May 12.

“I think I just kept making a loud enough noise,” Mr. Lewis, 50, said over dinner recently at Sardi’s. “It was like, ‘O.K., fine, you can play the part. Shut up!’ ”

This isn’t just a personal milestone for the actor, though. Mr. Lewis will be the first African-American to play the Phantom on Broadway, and only the second ever (the television actor Robert Guillaume played the role briefly in 1990 in the Los Angeles production). Including Michael Crawford, who headlined the show’s opening at the Majestic Theater in 1988, 16 actors have tackled the role on Broadway; the fourth Phantom, Kevin Gray, happened to be half-Chinese, but otherwise the famous white mask has rested exclusively on white faces.

In an interview backstage at the theater, the show’s composer, Andrew Lloyd Webber, marveled that only one other black actor has been cast in the role, through he said it was not for lack of interest. “It’s extraordinary — the one role in history you could really cast anybody you liked in is the Phantom,” Mr. Lloyd Webber conceded.

Still, he added, “I sat with Michael Jackson four or five times in this very building — he really wanted to play the role in the movie, but it never came to be.” A proposal to cast Sammy Davis Jr., who made the song “The Music of the Night” a staple of his concerts in the late 1980s, as the lead in the show’s Toronto production foundered when the singer was found to have throat cancer. (He died in 1990.)

The show’s director, Harold Prince dismisses the idea that casting Mr. Lewis is “in any way radical — I think we’ve passed that time,” he said in a phone interview. And the producer Cameron Mackintosh, speaking by phone from London, said, “We’re not casting Norm because he’s black, but because he’s good and right for the role.”

That he got a shot at the role at all, though, is a sign of change for the Broadway musical, which has evolved from creating black-only productions (“Dreamgirls,” “The Wiz,” “Once on This Island”) and shows with multicultural casts (“Rent,” “Ragtime”) to considering actors of all ethnicities for a range of roles previously reserved by default for white actors.

Mr. Lewis, who came to New York from his native Florida in the late 1980s, has had good fortune on both sides of this curve. He was a replacement in the role of John in “Miss Saigon,” a part that the producers decided to cast nontraditionally with black actors in the United Statesalthough there’s nothing ethnically specific about it (the role was originally played by a white actor in London). Mr. Lewis also played Javert in the 2006 revival of “Les Misérables” and King Triton in “The Little Mermaid,” with a white actress, Sierra Boggess, as his daughter. (Ms. Boggess will play the young soprano Christine in “Phantom.”)

If he was blazing a trail, it took others to point it out to him, Mr. Lewis said.

“A lot of young men have looked at me as an inspiration, and I didn’t know that until recently — I was just some guy getting a job,” said Mr. Lewis, who will host a starry concert evening, “Black Stars of the Great White Way Broadway Reunion: Live the Dream,” on June 23 at Carnegie Hall. What has especially moved his young admirers, he said, has been his work in roles that decades ago would have gone exclusively to whites. “They would see that I happened to be playing Javert or King Triton, and they would come up to me crying and saying, ‘You’re the reason why I’m singing,’ ” he said.

Race aside, the role of the Phantom is not one that just any actor can waltz into. Although his stage time is limited — 40 minutes of the two-and-a-half-hour show — the Phantom, as Mr. Prince put it, “must be a damned exhausting part.”

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Mr. Lewis as Porgy in “Porgy and Bess.”CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

“You have to be at a high level of emotion from the moment you’re heard onstage — you’re heard before you’re seen — and you have to stay at that height the entire time you’re on,” he said. “You don’t get to move up to the emotions; you’re at the peak of them at all times.”

Mr. Lloyd Webber said that he was impressed by Mr. Lewis’s “authority” in the part, and that the actor’s pairing with Ms. Boggess, an experienced Christine who will join Mr. Lewis for the first four months of his run, could make for “a very erotic night.”

Mr. Mackintosh, who first hired Mr. Lewis for “Miss Saigon,” sounded a slight note of caution, however. While Mr. Lewis has immense charm and “great heart,” the part of the Phantom requires “real steel, and that’s not something Norm usually has to play,” he said. “The Phantom has been locked away in his dark cell for years, and you can’t do a George Clooney on that.”

With his creamy vocal timbre and tall leading-man looks, Mr. Lewis has an old-school star quality tempered by an unfailing nice-guy modesty; it’s not at all surprising that his television work has included a few soaps and a turn as a suave senator on “Scandal,” or that his favorite singers are crooners like Dean Martin and Johnny Mathis. Though it would be easy to view the role of the Phantom in a similarly romantic vein, he said that’s not how he’ll be approaching it.

“It’s a very melodramatic piece — so is ‘Les Miz,’ ” Mr. Lewis said. “All these shows have that heightened feel. But you can find some truth in that, if everybody in the cast is on the same page. And I’m coming at this from the very basic level of asking, who is this guy and why is he acting like a baby?”

In a phone interview, Ms. Boggess sounded similarly earnest about the love triangle at the heart of “Phantom.” She said the father-daughter bond she formed with Mr. Lewis for “Little Mermaid” (she still jokingly calls him “Daddy” offstage) was a “happy accident” for their “Phantom” run.

“The Phantom literally uses that,” Ms. Boggess said. “Christine’s own father is dead, and the way the Phantom gets in with her is by pretending he’s an angel her father has sent.” If that sounds a little creepy — well, this is “Phantom of the Opera.”

The high-profile casting of Mr. Lewis, a Tony nominee for “Porgy and Bess,” seems a departure for “Phantom” in another way. The show’s long run has been sustained chiefly by its own brand name rather than by a succession of star turns, à la “Chicago” (Mr. Lewis, like virtually every other breathing leading actor in the New York metropolitan area, put in a few months as Billy Flynn, in his case in 2004). The casting of Mr. Lewis and Ms. Boggess may therefore be viewed by some as an effort to give the show a shot in the arm, or to reach what Mr. Lloyd Webber called “the Afro-American community.”

But the idea, according to the show’s creative team, originated when the current Phantom, Hugh Panaro, decided not to renew his contract, and the show’s music supervisor, David Caddick, happened to be on a panel with Mr. Lewis at a music festival last fall. Asked by an audience member about the state of minority casting on Broadway, the actor repeated his Phantom wish. This time, at last, the wheels started turning.

To land the role, Mr. Lewis still had to audition. He calmed his nerves by drawing courage from those who paved the way for him.

“I stood on the Majestic stage and just took a deep breath, and I felt the souls of people who have passed — Paul Robeson, William Warfield — but also people who are still alive, like André De Shields and Larry Marshall and Ben Vereen, and especially Robert Guillaume, who played this role, saying: ‘Go for it — show these people what you got. That’s all you can give them.’ And I kind of relaxed after that.”

Correction:

An article on May 4 about Norm Lewis, cast as Broadway’s first black Phantom of the Opera, misstated when he took over the role of John in “Miss Saigon.” He was the fifth replacement in the role on Broadway; he did not succeed Hinton Battle, who originated the part.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR6 of the New York edition with the headline: Stalking the Role of an Operatic Stalker. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe